Touchstone (7 page)

“I brought a cap,” she said. “We can just go from here to the Downstreet, can’t we?” A cap to hide her hair and enough of her face so that when she removed the coat people would think her a boy. “The nice one,” she added.

Cade knew the cap she meant. Blye had made a half-dozen child-sized pretend withies for Derien, and he had insisted on giving her his best cap in return, the sapphire velvet one with the puffy black feather. Being a shrewd little boy as well as a generous one, he’d told Lady Jaspiela that the wind had blown the cap into the river. As her ladyship was in company with Blye perhaps five times a year, and never deigned to notice her anyway, the chance of her seeing and recognizing the cap was nonexistent. That Dery so easily lied to their mother bothered Cade a little, but he shrugged it aside, knowing that if the boy was to have any kind of life of his own, he’d have to learn how to lie to her, and lie convincingly. That Dery had begged Cade for the withies, even if they were just pretend, after Lady Jaspiela reacted with horror to his request, told Cade that there was a nice streak of rebellion in his baby brother. And he grinned to himself every time he glimpsed Dery in his big bedroom on the third floor, solemnly declaiming “magical words” to bespell the glass twigs or waving them gently as imagination turned him into a Master Glisker. After twelve years of being the only child, pinched and pushed to fit a mold of his mother’s devising, Cade was rather wickedly looking forward to watching Derien stand up to her the way he himself had done. She deserved it.

“Blye, dearling!” Rafe’s mother, large and stout and loud, held out her arms to welcome the girl. Overwhelmed by a cinnamon-scented embrace—as Cade had been half an hour earlier—Blye hugged back. “You’ll be going with the boys tonight? Sweet Angels, I do wish I still had the figure to do the same! But that’s what being a baker’s wife will do, and it’s a fact not to be argued with. Come, leave the boys to their plotting. You and I will go into the kitchen and make their tea, and you can tell me how your dear father is these days. And don’t let me forget to send you home with a dozen of those little seedy cakes he likes.”

Even as she bustled with Blye through the kitchen door, her eyes sought the Elf with a look more suited to a woman half her age. Surely she was promising herself a much longer look later on. Rafe had noticed his mother’s sidelong glance; his jaw dropped slightly and his gray-blue eyes blinked wide. Cade hid a grin by turning his back and pretending to examine the magnificent inlaid chessboard hanging above the hearth. He’d learned to play on that board. Master Threadchaser’s pride and joy, it had been handed down from father to son for five generations, and an offer to take it down for a game was a signal that he liked you. As Cade examined for the hundredth time the delicate spiderweb patterns decorating its wide border, he had the thought that it was rather emblematic of the two families—that above this hearth was a symbol of intellectual skill, and above his mother’s was an empty looking-glass drained of magic, in which one could look only at oneself.

“Jeska, please tell me your house is easier to locate,” Mieka whined, and Cade decided it would waste too much time to remind the Elf that he’d been very clear about the location. Even if he hadn’t, all anyone had to do was ask about for a door with a spiderweb carved above it, proclaiming the family’s clan.

“Middle of the block, right after Marketty Round, can’t miss it,” the masquer replied absently as he scanned the evening’s performance charts. He was agonizingly meticulous, for he’d always had difficulty reading, which made him work all the harder at memorizing his lines. But he’d rarely got a word wrong in the year Cade had worked with him. “I think I’ve got this now, Cade, but I’d like to run through the whole thing at least once, just to make sure.”

Seating himself on a ladder-back chair with a glass basket of withies at his feet, Cade said, “As many times as you need, Jeska. We’ll be doing the ‘Sailor’ again tonight, and then ‘The Princess and the Deep Dark Well’—how are you at echoes, Mieka?”

“Excellent. But don’t you have something original? That’s such a boring old drudge of a thing.” He sprawled in one of the overstuffed chairs, looking disgruntled.

Still without glancing up, Jeska asked, “Hadn’t you noticed? Cade puts in things of his own all the time.”

“But not enough to make people
realize
it!”

“We’ll make a splash some other night,” Cade said. “We made this booking with another glisker, you know—somebody who works traditional.”

“They don’t know I’m coming? Get ready for a drenching, then, because it’s no mere splash we’ll make. The Downstreet is almost a real theater, you know. The stage was specially built, not just nailed together with spare planks. Big enough so I can really work!”

Rafe caught Cade’s glance and rolled his eyes. Was there no limit to Mieka’s arrogance? But what Rafe said had nothing to do with stemming the boy’s vanity. “You’ve played the Downstreet before?”

Incautiously, still caught up in his vision of their triumph, the Elf said, “Sat in with Vered and Rauel and Sakary one night, when Chattim took ill.”

“You
what
?” Jeska exclaimed.

“Good reason to think well of yourself, then, have you?” Rafe snarled. “Quite a downcoming, playing with quidams like us!”

Stricken, Mieka stammered, “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to say that—I mean, I’m not hiding anything, it was just one show and—” He looked an appeal at Cade. “Quill, it’s not like it sounds!”

So
that
was how he knew the Shadowshapers. Blye had mentioned that he knew them, but it turned out that Vered and Rauel had trusted him with their work. Only because their own glisker had been ill, but—Mieka had actually played a show with the Shadowshapers. Cade was all for interrogating him about what it had been like, and the pieces they’d done, and a hundred other things. But anger touched his tongue first, and he demanded, “Why so bloody eager to join up with
us,
then?”

“Sakary couldn’t cope with me, all right? I can’t help it when I don’t like the taste of someone’s magic, and he had a stranglehold on me and—and I fought him, I couldn’t help it! We got through the show and he hasn’t spoken to me since! He’s a good fettler, one of the best, but I couldn’t work with him—”

“Because he couldn’t
cope
with you?”

“Leave him be,” Rafe said suddenly. “You know the trouble they had finding a glisker, before Chattim. Like us. Just like us, Cade. Call it the taste or the feel of the magic, or puzzle pieces locking into place, or instinct, but you and me and Jeska worked strong together from the first. We fit.” Pointing a long finger at Mieka, he finished, “And so does he. With us. Not with them, nor anybody else.
Us
.”

Mieka cast him a grateful glance, then turned back to Cade with his shoulders slightly hunched, as if he was anticipating a fist to the jaw. “Cade?” he ventured. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier. But Rafe’s right, isn’t he?”

They were all looking at him now, waiting for his concurrence. How did he explain to them that knowing Mieka had worked with the absolute best, had done the glisking for two of the most innovative minds in the theater, had shaken his confidence on the very night when a successful booking at the Downstreet could assure their future?

“Please don’t be cross,” Mieka said softly.

“He’s not,” Rafe said with the certainty of long friendship. “He’s comparing himself to Vered and Rauel again, that’s all. He does it all the time. The good thing is that it always makes him work harder.” Eyeing Cade with wry understanding, he added, “If you’re through being overawed by the thought of
your
glisker working with the illustrious Shadowshapers, can we get down to it now?”

“Mine he is, and mine he’ll stay.”
He heard his own voice saying it just last evening. He nodded sharply.

“Right, then,” Rafe said. “What can you tell me about the Downstreet, Mieka? We’ve never played a place that big before.”

With a last wary glance at Cade, Mieka made a grimace that was half relief and half apology. “Nothing to it, really.”

“No, nothing at all,” Cade muttered, but when he caught the nervous flicker of those big eyes—dark now with apprehension, plain brown and murky—he shrugged and gestured for him to start talking.

The Downstreet was, as Mieka had mentioned, a real venue, not just a tavern with a rickety makeshift platform. The stage was actually divided for a performance: a solidly made wooden riser for the glisker, a lectern for the fettler, with the masquer given plenty of room. It was so big, in fact, that a glisker could add more than just the usual impressions of a landscape, buildings, a room’s interior: he could really paint a whole scene for the masquer to act against.

But there was a problem with this large a venue, as well, because the fettler had to make sure the people in the cheap seats could feel things, sense things, just as well as the people up front and in the middle. Rafe was nervous about exactly how and where to direct everything.

“How did Sakary do it?” he asked.

“Played to the middle, and just slightly to the right. The roof timbers aren’t evenly spaced on that side of the room. There’s an extra row crosswise, put in to support the Lady Shrine upstairs. The wife and daughters insisted, once there was coin enough for it. They’ve a stone plinth, and a little fountain—remind me to flick some extra magic up there. It’s only polite to give them a nice little cascade for their evening devotions.”

“Plinth
and
fountain?” Jeska asked, amazed. “Most noble ladies make do with molded plaster and a bowl!”

Mieka snorted. “‘Make do’ isn’t a thing the mistress would recognize if it introduced itself and paid for the privilege. She has plans for her girls, she does. The elder is to make a noble marriage, the younger will be consigned to whichever minster’s influence matches up with their money.” He paused, then resumed pensively, “Why is it that mothers lacking a son reach even higher than those with?”

“You’ve never met Lady Jaspiela,” Cade said before either of the other two could.

“Really?” Those eyes were lighter now, the shine back in them. “What did she want you to be, before you told her you’d be a tregetour or nothing?”

“His father’s at Court,” Rafe said quite casually, and Cade silently blessed him. “Her Ladyship was seeing Cayden there in a few years when Prince Ashgar takes a bride, and then a rich marriage, and by the time the grandchildren come, everybody’d forget that Herself married middle for the money and not upper for the glory.”

Mieka whistled softly between his teeth. “Sounds grim. Prince Ashgar is nobody’s pattern of perfection, is he? Lovely of your little brother to oblige you by being born. But if he’s anything like you, I’d imagine your lady mother will be thwarted a second time.” Shifting in the wide chair, drawing both legs up and wrapping his arms around his shins, he rested his chin on his knees. “Bless the good Gods for giving my parents four sets of twins! There’s enough of us to drive them stark staring mad, and they know it, so they let us do what we please!”

“Must be nice,” Jeska said. “Can we get on with the rehearsal now?”

“Yes,” Rafe said, “and I’d like to get there a bit early, and have a look at this ceiling. Extra timbers, and a big stone plinth above—it’ll be tricky, no doubt of it. How did you know about the Lady Shrine?”

“Showed it to me, didn’t she? Old ladies, they like me,” he confided with a smirk. “They think I’m sweet. Anyhow, the support timbers deflect things a bit odd, but if you play to the right, everything bounces just like it should, all the way back to the bar.”

An hour later they were all more than ready for their tea. In some ways, containing even the minimal magic used in rehearsal was harder on Rafe than an entire show. A few years ago, when they finally confessed to each other that they had the same ambitions regarding the theater and were learning their crafts, Cade had tried to impart as much as he recalled of what his grandsir the Master Fettler had taught him when he was little. Lady Jaspiela had not been pleased, having decided there were more distinguished uses for her son’s magic than stagecraft. But she hadn’t dared speak against it while the old man was still alive. Cade had tried to feel disappointed that he had no talent for his grandsir’s specialty; a restless imagination impelled him instead towards the creative process of the tregetour. But even years later, he remembered most of what he’d been taught, even if he didn’t really understand it, and had shared it all with Rafe. On one memorable occasion, up in Rafe’s big, airy bedchamber that occupied the whole of the attic high above the bakery, Cade’s attempted demonstration of how to expand and contract control had burst every piece of glass and ceramic in the room, including the mirror, and warped the chamber door into the bargain. It had never closed properly since, or so Rafe’s mother avowed with a wink at Cade every time she said it. She treasured the memory of that afternoon, for as it turned out, her son’s instincts had kicked him into containing Cade’s magic so that it didn’t run riot through the rest of the house. “Might have blown out every other window in the place, and in the bakery besides,” Mistress Threadchaser always said to finish the tale. “Cayden is that powerful—but
my
boy, he’s that strong!”

Once Jeska announced himself prepared, and Mieka had agreed with Cade on the exact sequence and nature of the magic, and Cade had done the minor shifts in the spells already within the withies, Rafe sank back into his chair with a long sigh of weariness.

“We go on at eight? Fine. Wake me five minutes before the show.”

“What you want is your tea, mate.” Mieka sprang to his feet and bounded lightly for the kitchen door.

Cade leaned towards his fettler, frowning. “Are you sure you’ll be ready for this tonight? Or maybe I ought to be asking if you can
cope
with him?”

Rafe shrugged. “It’s a different sort of tired, y’know.”

Nodding, Cade settled back again. He knew what Rafe meant. There was a look his friend wore sometimes after a performance that meant he’d spent the evening fighting to discipline an erratic or inexperienced glisker. This was not the same. Rafe had been modulating and adjusting, not struggling for control. The tired that came of satisfying work was entirely different from that of a long battle to a disappointing end.